Peaches a la Melba

July 15, 2023

Last year I visited the Center for Brooklyn History in Brooklyn Heights. I browsed through their menu collection from the early 20th century and became aware of Peach Melba's popularity. The Peach Melba is an ice cream dessert with peaches, cream, and raspberries popularized at swanky hotel restaurants during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, specifically at the Paris Hotel Ritz and London Carlton Hotel. Named after Nellie Melba, an Australian Scottish opera singer, its culinary creation was attributed to Auguste Escoffier. John Ayto, in The Diner's Dictionary, said that in 1892, the Peach Melba initially "...consisted of a swan carved out of ice, bearing some vanilla ice cream on which reposed peaches surmounted with a net of spun sugar." (Ayto) Agnes Bertha Marshall, a chef, was known for including ice cream swans in her cookbooks in London. In 1891, Marshall published a recipe in Mrs. A.B. Marshall's Larger Cookery Book of Extra Recipes, called 'Petits Cygnes a la Bosphore' made with cold noyeau glace in a swan mold, with fruit, cream, colored sugar, and spun sugar. The Book of Ices by Agnes Bertha Marshall (1852 - 1905) mentions an early recipe for cooking Peaches a la Melba with vanilla ice cream, champagne, peach, arrowroot, and carmine red food coloring and using her own Marshall's Raspberry Syrup. The recipe was published after 1884; however, the exact date is unknown. In 1902 Peaches a la Melba was served to Queen Alexandra of Denmark during an eight-course royal meal at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane in London. In 1903, Peaches a la Melba was described as follows, "Peaches a la Melba are skinned thinly coarse in arrowroot, and served hot with a sauce made of grape juice, exquisitely prepared." (The Chickasha Express Star) According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the New York Times was the first to mention the dish 'Peaches Melba' sans 'a la' in a November 5, 1905 newspaper edition. The book The Heart of the Antarctic by Ernest Shackleton is about his expedition to the South Pole between 1907-1909, which details his longing for exquisite dishes of the time. For the duration of his journey to Antarctica, his team of British explorers ate snow and frozen meat and suffered from hunger and frostbite; to ease the discomfort of starvation, his squad of deprived men used their imagination and dreamed of eating splendid meals, including the regal peaches a la melba. As the sweet orange-colored peaches, white iced cream, and tart red raspberries toured the world, it eventually made its way to America and, like Nellie Melba, became a famous star in the booming hotel restaurant industry.

• The Chickasha daily express. (Chickasha, Indian Territory [Okla.]), 17 Feb. 1903. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86090528/1903-02-17/ed-1/seq-3/>
• The St. Louis Republic. [volume] (St. Louis, Mo.), 02 Nov. 1902. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020274/1902-11-02/ed-1/seq-31/>
• Herbst S. T. & Herbst R. (2007). The new food lover's companion : more than 6 700 a-to-z entries describe foods cooking techniques herbs spices desserts wines and the ingredients for pleasurable dining (4th ed.). Barron's Educational Series.
• Smith, A. (2012). Peach Melba. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. : Oxford University Press. 
• "peach Melba, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023, www.oed.com/view/Entry/254092 
• Ayto, J. (2012). Melba. In The Diner's Dictionary. : Oxford University Press.
• Wikipedia contributors. (2023, April 23). Peach Melba. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
• Shackleton, E. Henry., David, T. W. Edgeworth (Tannatt William Edgeworth)., Mill, H. Robert. (1909). The heart of the Antarctic: being the story of the British Antarctic Expedition 1907-1909. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott company. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007695966   

The Luttrell Psalter (ca. 1325 - 1340)

17th Century Forest Glass

July 13, 2023

Over the last several days, I've spent my time researching Dutch oil paintings from the 1600s, and a Flemish artist Pieter Claesz  (ca. 1597 – 1660), who is known for creating golden age still lifes, repeatedly features one object in nearly all of his paintings. It's a green glass goblet with a broad base and thick handle covered in spiky circular protruding ridges. This vessel is often depicted in golden age still-lifes by accompanying artists, such as Willem Claesz Heda. In paintings, the goblet usually contains white wine resting on a tablecloth next to bread, lemons, olives, nuts, crab, cheese, and kinds of seafood such as fish, oysters, shellfish, and fruits such as stone fruits, berries, or grapes, and silverware such as a tazza, plates, and knives. Pieter Claesz and other flemish artists turned the green goblet into a masterpiece muse. The goblet is called a roemer and is made of German forest glass. According to The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts, a roemer is a "type of German or Dutch wineglass with a knobbed or 'prunted' stem and a conical foot, made of green Waldglas in the Rhineland since the 15th century and still in common use for drinking the white wines of the Rhine." (Campbell) Forest glass is melted and molded with sand and ash; according to Campbell, the greenish color is from the beech potash alkaline in the German forests. The details from the base to the neck of the roemer were often "...decorated with raspberry prunts...."(Campbell) Dutch Golden Age painters such as Pieter Claesz's use of the green goblet in oil painting is symbolic as the vessel represents a transformation from the sand near the shores that bring in food from the sea and also from the forest ash, which is, in essence, the same earthy land where our citrus, grape vineyards, raspberries, and olive trees emerge—all essential components featured in Golden Age still life paintings. 

• Campbell, G. (2006). Römer in The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts: Oxford University Press. 
• Campbell, G. (2003). Glass. In The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance. : Oxford University Press.

Manna and Canaan

July 12, 2023

What seems like 900 years ago, during my days in art school, I signed up for a class exploring art and the Bible. I looked forward to analyzing the parables through art history. However, I was the only enrolled student, and the class was canceled. Since then, I've been unproductively trying to read through the Bible; it's my Ulysses. A lengthy book packed with stories, I get hung up in Numbers, and my interest fades. My overly critical nature, mixed with my general god fear of being struck down as a disbeliever, also prevents me from getting through the big black book. Regardless, I intend to explore biblical foods and must power my will to finish. Manna and Canaan will be my first Hebrew Bible food topic to write about. According to the Bible, Moses led thousands of enslaved peoples out of Egypt through the Sinai Peninsula; starving and thirsty, they rested in a desert oasis drinking from springs of water, and Moses said, "At twilight, you will eat meat, and in the morning, you will be filled with bread." (Exodus 16:11) Quail along with snowflakes of grain covered the desert, the people gathered, baked and boiled bread called manna which was, "... white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey." (Exodus 16:31) The free people were instructed to keep the dough, yeast or bread for future generations. After becoming nourished by specks of grains dropped from the heavens and water from the oasis springs, they journeyed towards Canaan, the land of milk and honey, and Moses' emancipated Israelites explored the fertile lands and found lush grapes, pomegranates, and figs. (Numbers 13) In paintings, the grapes of Canaan are often depicted as gigantic fruits, similar to the children's book about oversized foods that fall from the sky called, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett. 

• Zondervan. (2011). Holy Bible. United States: Zondervan.

B is for Bretzel

July 11, 2023

According to The Grocer's Encyclopedia by Artemas Ward, "Pretzels, formerly called Bretzels, [are] hard brittle twists of dough, shaped into a letter B, dipped in hot lye, salted and baked hard. They are common in Germany and among Germans in this country [the U.S. in 1911] as an adjunct to beer." (Ward) Bretzel, with a B, turned into the word pretzel during the Franco-German translation to English. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, the word Bretzel comes from the medieval Latin word brachiate, meaning "....having arms, branched, formed from brachium arm. The name comes from the way that the distinctive knot of a pretzel can be seen as like crossed arms." (Cresswell) The dough is rolled out and shaped like long flappy arms folded across the chest to resemble the body's shape during medieval European prayer, or so the legend goes. The J. Paul Getty Museum mentions, "The pretzel is a symbol of everlasting life as its form was originally designed to recall a child's arms folded in prayer." The myth of the Holy Bretzel stretches back to monks, the Catholic Church, and Southern Europe. The New York Times stated, "A pretzel is shown on a fifth-century illuminated manuscript in the Vatican" (Goldstein). The article did not mention which 5th-century manuscript; I've browsed the Vergilius Romanus manuscript and can not find anything that resembles a pretzel. Unless one considers the illumination from Vergilius Vaticanus from the 4th century, which depicts a Roman woman with arms reaching for a tiny reddish-brown edible broken object on a plate from four youth, could this be a Bretzel? The holy bread branched out and crusaded across Europe, becoming popular in Last Supper depictions, Germany, and Holland leading to the Dutch transporting it across the ocean and landing it in the biblical Pennsylvania Dutch territory. This Sunday, consider saying your prayers while eating your holy bretzels. 

• Cresswell, J. (2021). Pretzel. In Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. : Oxford University Press. 
• Goldstein, E. (1988, November 13). Fare of the Country; Philadelphia’s Twist on the Pretzel. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/13/travel/fare-of-the-country-philadelphia-s-twist-on-the-pretzel.html 
• Ward, A. (1911). The Grocer's Encyclopedia. New York. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001046303 
• The Last Supper (The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection). (n.d.). https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103S5J 

The Aztec Florentine Codex

July 10, 2023

Spanish Catholic Missionary Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) created the Florentine Codex, which documents the customs and traditions of the Aztec peoples written in Spanish and Nahuatl. The Library of Congress has a digitized online version called General History of the Things of New Spain (The Florentine Codex) by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, originally from the Medicea Laurenziana Library in Florence. The book illustrates and describes Aztec foods. The most important thing to note is Aztecs were cited as being cannibals and ritualistically sacrificed children, enslaved people, and prisoners to their Gods, regardless of their violent and contentious religious practices reported by the Spanish and debated by historians and archeologists, the foods of the Aztec peoples transformed the way the world eats, i.e., chocolate! Some of the foods consumed by the Aztecs include maize, chia, amaranth, squash seeds, corn, beans, squash, avocados, cacao, chili peppers, sweet potatoes, peanuts, guavas, sapotes, sage, coriander, algae, cacti, mushrooms, tomato, turkeys, rabbits, dogs, birds, fish, duck, ants, grasshoppers, turkey eggs, frog, axolotl, gopher, honey and agave. Pulque is a fermented cactus beverage, pozole is a corn stew, atole is a sweetened corn drink, and tamales are corn husk-wrapped dumplings. Aztec ingredients and practices merged with European and Spanish influences to create modern-day Mexican cuisine, which I will write about later. I'm looking forward to reading Sacred Consumption: Food and Ritual in Aztec Art and Culture (2016) by Elizabeth Morán.

• Olver, L. (n.d.). The Food Timeline--Aztec, Maya & Inca foods. https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodmaya.html 
• Smith M. E. (1996). The Aztecs. Blackwell: Oxford https://archive.org/details/aztecs00smit 
• Super, J., & Vargas, L. (2000). Mexico and Highland Central America. In K. Kiple & K. Ornelas (Eds.), The Cambridge World History of Food (pp. 1248-1254). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521402156.016  
• Coe, S. (2006). Aztec food. In The Oxford Companion to Food. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 7 Jul. 2023, from https://www-oxfordreference-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/view/10.1093/acref/9780192806819.001.0001/acref-9780192806819-e-0124 
• Coe S. D. (1994). America's first cuisines (1st ed.). University of Texas Press. 

Seeds

July 9, 2023

It is now the season of sweet summer fruits. I went to the beach today; and ate a peach. I stared at the ocean and sat in the sand on a clear day with blue skies and a breeze; the peach was bright orange, reflecting the sun. It was juicy, nectarous, tart, with a peach pit seed, sharp and solidified like rockhard lava at its core. Flavorful and nutritiously vital after a day of dehydration and perspiring flakes of salt coating clothes and skin. When in nature, I thank the planet for its fruits and the beautiful world she created. Thank you for the amazing natural world. Yesterday, I sliced open a green seedless watermelon and noticed for the first time that the center of the watermelon contained a fractal-like pattern. It was a sweet sighting; spotting natural fractals is a unique experience. I looked down at the red watermelon pulp sliced in the shape of a circular pie split into three slices, each containing two paisley-like white spirals, ending with four or five white seeds. With a few dangling black seeds fighting for survival. I picked up two black seeds and planted them in my backyard soil. I'm a seed collector and grocery store gardener. I save virtually all seeds, like peppers, berries, melons, apples, citrus, and pomegranates. I dry, store, and plant my gathered supermarket sowables. I worry about seedless fruits, and I miss the abundant large black seeds within the watermelons of my childhood, where finding a white one was an anomaly. Black seeds are hard to find these days. Perhaps we will no longer have fruit one day, as commercial food conglomerates love to tweak, control, and create Frankenstein-like seedless clones. Therefore, I save my seeds, date them, and resist those who attempt to control mother nature's fruits.

American Peanut Butter

July 8, 2023

As an American always on a budget, I depend on peanut butter for a cheap and filling meal. I consume Skippy Natural or Jif, and I add it to vegetable soups, spicy ramen noodles, rice dishes, sandwiches, and chocolate ice cream and I eat it on the trail or with celery; it's versatile, packed with carbs and protein, and cheap. Peanuts were initially from South America and were part of Incan rituals and used in Aztec cuisine in Central America; during the 16th century, peanuts became a new world export, landing in Africa via the Portuguese, and peanuts were a staple in African cuisine and during enslavement. In North America, peanuts were associated with Virginia hog fodder and slavery, thanks to the English, like President Thomas Jefferson, an early Virginian who owned hundreds of enslaved peoples during his peanut farming years at Monticello. Associated with the impoverished and livestock, "the belief that peanuts tasted good but were not proper food for the elites has been around since at least the 1500s." (McWilliams) Yet, during the late 1800s, peanut butter became a status symbol of the white elites due to John Harvey Kellogg and the Seventh-day Adventist and Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, who popularized peanuts as a healthier scientific vegetarian alternative to meat consumption. "One of the places Kellogg lectured was Alabamas Tuskegee Institute, where one of the listeners was the great scientist George Washington Carver, whose efforts led to massive increases in the American peanut crop after World War I."(McWilliams) As peanut butter became more widespread across all class boundaries, its consumption spread to the masses through marketing campaigns and to school-aged children with the invention of the early 20th-century PB&J sandwich. Jimmy Carter, as well as Thomas Jefferson, is another American President with an English heritage who owned peanut plantations in the South. As Mark McWilliams says in his book, The Story Behind the Dish, "Peanut butter is a truly American product." (McWilliams)

• McWilliams, Mark. The Story Behind the Dish: Classic American Foods : Classic American Foods, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central. 
• Dwyer, J., & Sandhu, R. (2000). Peanuts. In K. Kiple & K. Ornelas (Eds.), The Cambridge World History of Food (pp. 364-374). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521402149.037 
• Katz S. H. & Weaver W. W. (2003). Encyclopedia of food and culture. Scribner.
• Smith, A. (2012). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. : Oxford University Press.
• KRAMPNER, J. (2013). Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/kram16232 

The Prado Museum

The Edible Series

Reaktion Books, established in 1985, is a book publishing company in London that produces a series of books about global food history called The Edible Series, edited by the food historian Andrew F. Smith. The University of Chicago Press distributes the series in the United States. 

Prickly Pear Cactus

July 5, 2023

At my table is a jar of prickly pear cactus jelly recently brought back from Arizona and a cup of prickly pear cactus tea, which is so deliciously addicting I buy two boxes at a time. "Cactus pear juice, jellies, and candies are ... available from sources in Mexico, the southwestern United States, Sicily..." (Defelice) When I was a child in a California desert town close to the Mexican border, I remember eating the cactus fruit in my friend's backyard; she had a large old gnarled cactus tree growing next to her sunny California swimming pool; as I bounced on the diving board swinging my arms, I would see red prickly fruits bobbing up and down at the end of the pool with each cacti arm reaching towards me as I jumped into the water. My friend's mother from Mexico would slice up the red fruit for us to eat. "Cactus pear in cultivation and the wild is scattered across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, southern California, down through Mexico..."(Defelice) Mexico is deeply connected to the nopal (cactus) tunas (fruit) rojas, so much so that the prickly pear cactus is on the Mexican flag and passport. The iconic image of an eagle eating a snake on top of red-fruited cacti originates in Aztec mythology. "The founding of Mexico City [Tenochtitlan] in 1325 was based on a prophecy containing a reference to the nopal cactus." (Defelice) Tenochtitlan became the capital of the Aztec Empire when their god, Huitzilopochtli, directed the people to build a city at the location of an eagle eating a snake on top of a cactus; thus, the capital was built in Lake Texcoco. The great Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, as with the Aztec sacrificial heart-beating culture, was eventually destroyed by the Spanish searching for gold and treasures, and "prickly-pear cacti were brought to Europe by the first Spanish conquerors between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century." (Giuseppe Barbera, et al.) As an adult, I visited Europe, including Sicily, which has a similar climate to southern California and is the perfect environment for cacti to flourish, "commercial cactus pear fruit production succeeded in Sicily and remains a successful crop on the island." (Defelice) During my Sicilian travels, I stopped along the side of the road and picked a prickly fruit, wrapping it in my scarf, hoping to recreate the delicious memories of my childhood. I mistakenly forgot to wipe away all the prickles. I was covered in splinters for several days, throwing away my scarf and unable to enjoy my fruit native to the Americas. The indigenous trick is to roll the cactus fruit in the sand to wipe off all the spines. My years growing up in a dried-up southern California desert has left a persistent prickle in my heart for cactus fruit. 

• Defelice, Michael S. (2004). Prickly Pear Cactus, Opuntia spp.: A Spine-Tingling Tale. Weed Technology, 18(3), 869–877. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3989388 
• Davidson, A. (2006). prickly pear. In Jaine, T. (Ed.), The Oxford Companion to Food. : Oxford University Press.
• Giuseppe Barbera, Francesco Carimi, & Paolo Inglese. (1992). Past and Present Role of the Indian-Fig Prickly-Pear (Opuntia ficus-indica (L.) Miller, Cactaceae) in the Agriculture of Sicily. Economic Botany, 46(1), 10–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4255403 
• King, Heidi. "Tenochtitlan." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–.http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/teno_1/hd_teno_1.htm  (October 2004)
• Wikipedia contributors. (2023, May 26). Tenochtitlan. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:53, June 30, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tenochtitlan&oldid=1157124425

Dished up at The MET

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service

A Mexican & American restaurant in Holbrook, Arizona, displaying a sign No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service (1972). The No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service signs emerged in the late 60s and early 70s as owners began to prevent the bearded and barefoot hippie drifters from entering 'respectable' restaurants. Leaving some citizens in the early 70s wondering about the drifting hippie movement, "What gives our young people the urge to wander?" (The Daily Intelligencer, 1971). Photograph by Lyntha Scott Eiler. Source: The National Archives and Records Administration. 

Summer at the Shore

July 2, 2023

Where I temporarily live, in the Garden State, it's going to rain for a week, which is necessary for my garden—bouncing back from last year's deadly drought, but the rain is not great for the beach. All the hours and days lounging on the sandy shores soaking up the sun, and changing skin like a chameleon to darker bronzed hues, must wait until the rain passes through. Growing up in California in the 1980s, I walked the coast sands spotted with neon bathing suits next to a harsh, frigid Pacific Ocean; I never went in the ocean; perhaps my mom never allowed me to go into the water. It was the 80s; Jaws dominated the big screen, and, through cinematic imagination, the beast must've patrolled the shoreline too. I don't remember a California boardwalk serving fries soaked in vinegar, soft-serve custard, or pizza—the East Coast shores of the Atlantic Ocean were responsible for these memories. Thrasher Fries made fresh boardwalk fries, salty and doused in vinegar in Ocean City, Maryland. Kohr Bros served the creamiest and eggiest chocolate and vanilla custard in an oversized twist. Manco & Manco pizza is a classic touristy treat in Ocean City, NJ. With sandy hands and ravenous appetites from a day of swimming and overheating, there is nothing like the summer experience of eating at the Jersey shore. 

Cookbooks: TV & Movies

It Happened in the Kitchen (1941)

June 30, 2023

I found out about the commercial film, It Happened in the Kitchen (1941) while browsing the Hagley Museum archive. It's a short film all about the joy of modern kitchens, featuring all these happy, manicured women cooking with smiles in their new electric kitchens while their husbands, fathers, or brothers are away at work. I love 20th-century advertisements and how they sell fantasies to Americans. My kitchen has similarities: shiny white cabinets, white appliances, and silver handles. However, I'm never dressed up, wearing makeup, or smiling while wearing an apron. I'm usually in an oversized sweatshirt with permanent oil stains, frowning in concentration and focusing on finding a missing ingredient. At the same time, my formerly feral cat - who chronically suffered from giardia, tries to jump on my cutting board. Then there was the time my kitchen ceiling leaked for six months; using one of my rusty pots, I brilliantly and graciously stood on a stool (careful not to get whacked by the ceiling fan) and placed the pot on top of my shiny plastic laminate kitchen cabinets to collect all the drops of water, and pooling swirls with specks of plaster. Channeling the happy housewife of the 1940s, the Cheshire Cat-like grin stretched across my face, and I was as happy as a clam with my marvelous kitchen accomplishments. It Happened in the Kitchen in New Jersey (2023), another dark comedy currently produced in a Jersey kitchen near you.

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Dishwashing

June 2, 2023

Washing dishes is an important skill every person should learn during their adolescent or formative years. I was raised in a hoarded house that never cleaned or perhaps sometimes pretended to clean by buying cleaning products and not using them. I followed my elders as they sat in front of a television screen all hours of the day. I remember the sink was always full of dirty dishes, and I never contributed to their washing. In my young adult years, I leaned on takeaway; I rarely needed to wash dishes because my dishware was made of disposable plastic and paper (sorry, mother earth, I'll make it up to you for my waste). As a less wasteful adult, I eventually learned how to care for my environment through rituals and routines. I washed dishes by hand for hours before a sink for twenty years with dry and cracked skin. The electronic dishwasher makes such tasks more manageable for the hands; however, such a modern invention is a complete luxury for New York City apartments. Washing dishes is fundamental to maintaining order and health in one's home environment. According to the Cleaning Institute, here are the five steps to washing dishes.

• Prep - scrape off food

• Fill - get some clean, hot, soapy water

• Wash - scrub them under the water

• Rinse - wash off all suds and residue

• Dry - air dry or towel dry

Cookbooks: Tacos!

Lobsters in Art

The Earl of Sandwich

June 24, 2023

It is said the inventor of the handheld meal, sandwiched between two pieces of bread, was the British politician John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich (1718 – 1792). The Earl of Sandwich was known as a gambler, fixated on his cards, and had no time to sit down for a slow meal at the dinner table, so he ordered the preparation of sliced salted meats between two pieces of bread to be delivered to his card game. Hence, the sandwich was born. The sandwich is world famous; there are many types, such as the reuben, croque-monsieur, club, submarine, po'boy, panini, hero, hoagie, pb&j, banh mi, egg salad, tuna, cheesesteaks, egg and cheese on a roll, BLT, etc. During my first trip to New York, I visited the Stage Deli  (now closed), and I ate one of my life's most oversized pastrami sandwiches, named after celebrities like Joe DiMaggio, Alec Baldwin, James Brown, Dolly Parton, and Rudy Guiliani. When I first moved to New York, I would go to Peanut Butter & Co. (now closed) and order their novelty item, the Peanut Butter BLT. My favorite sandwich during my teen years was loaded with sliced turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce called the Thanksgiving sandwich. The worst sandwich I've ever had was an Alligator Po'boy with rock-hard chunks of gator meat. When in Philadelphia, I look forward to eating a cheesesteak, and I've never had a lousy Reuben sandwich from a Diner. The only sandwiches I eat these days are from Jersey Mike's. I thank the gambler and man of leisure for his obsessive laziness, which led to the sandwich's invention. 

Bernard Palissy Ware

June 23, 2023

Bernard Palissy, c.1510–1590, was a science writer and potter who died in France while imprisoned for heresy for his Protestant religious beliefs. Before his demise, he created grotesque ceramic dishes molded from dead aquatic marsh animalia and painted in a lead glaze. For some reason, Palissy's hideous earthenware became popular during the late 1800s, with copycat artists such as Thomas-Victor Sergent (c. 1830– 1890), José Francisco de Sousa, Charles-Jean Avisseau (1796–1861), Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro (1846–1905) and Georges Pull (1810–1889) revitalizing the naturalist's love of dead lizards, frogs, and snakes slithering on dishes that may or may not have been used to serve food. 

Vincent Van Gogh's Hunger

June 22, 2023

Vincent Van Gogh is famously known for cutting off his ear and painting vividly colorful oil paintings of sunflowers and starry night skies. For the first thirty years, the Dutch painter worked in England and France, dabbled in professional work, teaching, and ministry, and then found his impoverished and short career as an artist at 27. A drinker of absynthe made from wormwood and a devotee to living as a struggling artist, Van Gogh created around 900 paintings while severely malnourished. He often painted European peasants working the fields using dark, dismal colors to represent the misery of life surviving on potatoes. Joseph Hautvast wrote a piece describing The Potato Eaters, one of Van Gogh's more famous works, and described the dish eaten by the peasants as "...damping potatoes and a chicory brew." (Hautvast) Van Gogh himself, in a letter to his brother Theo, described the painting as follows, "I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food." (Oxford Reference) As a failed preacher, Van Gogh devoted his life to bringing awareness to poverty. During the last ten years of his life, according to preserved letters written to his brother, Vincent mentioned, "...I have lived mainly on 23 cups of coffee, with bread..." and "two eggs every morning," Once mentioning the kindness of a neighbor who brought beans and potatoes over for dinner which made Van Gogh express, "there are things that make life worth living after all." (Clarkson) Towards the last years of his life, while in a mental health asylum in France, "his doctor advised him to eat more." (Cusack) Regardless of professional advice, Van Gogh ended his life in 1890 at the age of 37, with parting words of "The sadness will last forever." The life of a starving artist produces great work for the world to see, yet the sacrifices to one's mind and body can be lethal. 

• Hautvast, J. G. (1999). The Potato Eaters. The Lancet (British Edition), 354, SIV37–SIV37. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(99)90380-X
• Clarkson, J. (2013). Food history almanac : Over 1,300 years of world culinary history, culture, and social influence. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 
• Cusack, T. (2022). Food and Movement in Modernist Art. Dublin Gastronomy Symposium.
• Vincent Van Gogh. Oxford Reference. Retrieved 22 Jun. 2023, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095857848.

Camping

June 21, 2023

Happy Summer Solstice! Tis the season for camping... and forest fires. The only good thing about New Jersey is the quick access to wilderness. The Delaware Water Gap includes waterfalls, lengthy hikes, the Appalachian trail, salamanders, snakes, bears, and the Appalachian Mountain Club's Mohican Outdoor Center (which is fantastic, absolutely eat the brownies). Worthington State Park is an idyllic camping spot next to the Delaware River, in which you can drop in with a tube or raft, but beware, the river is dangerous and has a strong undercurrent where your foot can get stuck in the rocks, and the park rangers have reported many deaths over the years. Northern New Jersey also has some beautiful trails, parks, and campgrounds. Campfires and the preparation of outdoor meals are a central part of camping. Smores, lightweight foods for backpacking, noodle dishes, and traditional ice-chest cooler-type meals, foraged foods, there is a lot one can do. Quite a few campground cookbooks are available to inspire many smokey protein-packed meals. Everything needs to be lightweight when backpacking, so I prefer boiling spicy chili peanut ramen noodles and drinking powdered beverages. I'm looking forward to the brownies at the Mohican Outdoor Center!

Moon Pies

June 20, 2023

The Moon Pie was my childhood obsession. Perhaps the food obsession began because of my childhood nickname, Mandy Moon Child, and I felt a cosmic connection to this marshmallowy, diabetes-induced backwoods campground treat, or maybe because it was cheap and available at my economically challenged country grocery store. Whatever the case, I still love Moon Pies and can always find them at my local dollar store. I nostalgically look at the packaging, open the plastic wrap, take one bite of the overly sweet processed treat, and spit it out. Throwing the box and the rest of the pies in the trash can. Every time, I repeat the same Moon Pie ritual. They are disgusting fake foods but I will always love them. I'm sure a freshly prepared version would be so scrumptious! I'm also a fan of Whoopie Pies and Oreos. My ol' bakery in Brooklyn sold vegan Whoopie Pies, which were addicting. Stuffed: The Sandwich Cookie Book by Heather Mubarak, published in 2023, includes recipes for ice cream sandwiches, whoopie pies, and homemade Oreos. It's a lot of fun! 

• Dickson Ron William M Clark and Scrawls Scrawls. 1985. The Great American Moon Pie Handbook. Atlanta, Ga: Peachtree.
• Smith, Andrew F. "Moon Pie." In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. : Oxford University Press, 2012. 
• Magee David. 2006. Moonpie: Biography of an Out-Of-This-World Snack. Lookout Mountain TN: Jefferson Press. 

Xi'an Famous Food

June 19, 2023

When homesick for New York City, I skim through cookbooks about Gotham restaurants. Xi'an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York's Favorite Noodle Shop (2020) by Jason Wang, Jessica Chou, and Jenny Huang, brings me back to a very satisfying meal that I've had dozens of times—the Spicy Cumin Lamb dish with thick chunky biang-biang noodles, and a spicy blood-red chili sauce. The noodle dish is exceptionally delicious, spicy, savory, and satiating for a great cheap eats price. Walking around Brooklyn on rainy, cold days, I would pop into Xi'an Famous Foods, order the N1, F6, and L2, and sit reclusively facing a wall, reading and enjoying spicy noodles in solitude. It's going to be a rainy week, and I will again relive my memories on the wet and dirty grayish brown streets and step into a storefront of one of the best fast food chains in NYC.

American Burgers

Summer Fruits

June 17, 2023

Summer has arrived; the longest day of the year is June 21, 2023. This season, my garden has already produced raspberries. My blackberries and grapes are growing on crisscrossing vines too, and I will soon have an abundance of fruits to eat. Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit by Abra Berens came out in spring, which includes recipes for 15 different types of fruit, including gooseberries. Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard by Nigel Slater was published in 2012; a collection of beautifully photographed stone fruit dishes, baked berry cobbles, and recipes including quince. It's a rich and luxurious version of comfort desserts. One year in Brooklyn, I signed up for an affordable CSA, and organic fruits from Amish farms were trucked into a nearby Brooklyn backdoor; I carried home juicy peaches, heavy watermelons, and endless kiwi berries. It was a treat and a seemingly better and more flavorful food experience than what was available at my neighborhood grocery store. 

Cookbook Authors: Sarit Packer & Itamar Srulovich

Brooklyn Pork

June 15, 2023

My food blog took a two-month hiatus to focus on revenue - a challenging journey, as I am not successful at earning legal tender. I am exiled in New Jersey, in the land of wolves, and I dream about returning to my homeland. Above are two photographs from my days in Brooklyn that remind me of my freedom to walk the blocks. The images are of Polish and Italian butcher shops in Greenpoint and Carroll Gardens. Oh, how I miss the best city in the world. The freedom to walk to small businesses, restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, ice cream shops, cheese shops, butchers, food trucks, pizzerias, international grocery stores, markets, and rooftop farms, all during an afternoon walk. One cannot experience and see so much in the isolating suburbs of New Jersey. This little piggy wants to cry wee wee wee all the way home to New York City. 

• Goldfish Bowl, Santorini, Greece (1937) by Herbert List